


put my guns in the ground

by sealavenderinajamjar



Category: The 100 (TV), The 100 Series - Kass Morgan
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Post-Season/Series 02, tw: brief description of death and mass grave
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-31
Updated: 2015-08-31
Packaged: 2018-04-18 07:38:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4697768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sealavenderinajamjar/pseuds/sealavenderinajamjar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everybody's messed up after the events of Mount Weather, but no one more than Clarke and Bellamy. How they cope with it will be their make or break. In universe, post-S2, super angsty. Song title taken from the eponymous "Knockin' On Heavens Door".</p>
            </blockquote>





	put my guns in the ground

**Author's Note:**

> So I rewatched the last two episodes of S2 (because I'm a masochist) and it got me thinking about how on earth Clarke's going to come back from what she did, and then this really morbid line pops into my head (the first line, as a matter of fact). So I sort of went with it? Also it's canon that 1) Clarke goes a bit mad and 2) Bell is pissed at her, so I really wanted to explore that. Anyway, hope you enjoy!

She buries the bodies first.

Snaking her way through the underground, she finds shovels, long forgotten, and begins to dig. Her hands become calloused within hours, her fingernails caked with dirt. The pit grows, and she lives off the rations she finds in the soldiers quarters, sleeps in the tunnels. Then she has to bring out the dead. 

The smell is overpowering, but she ploughs ahead, a scarf wrapped around her face. Some of the bodies are heavy, some are unbearably light, but she takes them all, wraps them in blankets, and lays them side by side in the ground.

Atlas carries her victims to their final resting place.

It’s hardest when she knows the faces, recognises the clothing. She lays Maya down with her father, the two mismatched in their death, but with the same looks on their faces.  
She put them there. She put them all there, in this hole, and there’s no way out. No way out of what she’s done. 

After she’s finished she begins the long, arduous task of filling in the mass grave. He voice is hollow as she recites the dying rites over and over.

“In peace, may you leave the shore. In love, may you find the next. Safe passage on your travels until our final journey to the ground. May we meet again.”  
Over and over, her voice cracking, as she covers them up. Mothers, fathers, children, grandparents.

Gone, gone, gone.

She finishes, smooths over the dirt with the flat side of the spade, and then takes out a knife. On the surrounding trees, her sure hands, once used for creating art, now carve.

“INNOCENT”

She finishes, the knife drops to the ground, followed closely by her knees. 

How easy would it be, she thinks, to lie in this dirt forever. To let the ground swallow her whole, until nothing was left behind but the memory of a murderer girl, who sacrificed the many for the few.

She must be truly evil, she thinks. No good person would do this. No good person could.

Clarke Griffin is going mad.

She wanders the forests, eating berries and nuts she comes across. Sometimes they make her hallucinate. Sometimes they don’t.

She almost prefers the hallucinations sometimes, an escape from the agony of her thoughts, from the hurt in her heart. She sees them, her ghosts, in all their glory. Her father doesn’t come very often, but when he does, he’s kind, he’ll always be kind.

Wells is next, his gentle smile contrasting with the blade sticking out of his neck. He forgives her, as if she deserves it. Finn is almost the worst, he still has a knife in his chest and his heart on his sleeve. He has his own demons too, he says. Who’d ever heard of a ghost with ghosts?

Then come the Mount Weather and Ton DC dead, in their hordes. They scream and scream, and she lets them, curling up in a ball and letting their hate wash over her. This is what she deserves, she tells herself. This is her punishment.

She claws bloody gouges into her hands, and wipes the blood on her face. Her outsides need to match her insides now.

She comes across the Tree Kru once, their homes subdued and much less than she expected. She sees Indra across a field, and she thinks Indra sees her madness too. The Tree People whisper amongst themselves at her bloody, dishevelled appearance. The sky girl who took on the mountain, they say. Like she could be a legend rather than a creature from a horror story.

They give her water and she’s on her way again, walking, always walking.

Then she loses the river, and everything turns cold and dark. That is what she last remembers, before consciousness escapes her. 

 

-

 

They find her three months after she left, thin and cold on ground close to camp. It is Lincoln who comes across her, frozen and barely breathing, and carries her home. Abby cries at the state of her, at the blood which looks like tears under her eyes, for the childhood her daughter had given up to become an unwilling warrior.

Raven is the first one to visit her, cautious and detached. She’s the one to see the madness behind her eyes, the twitches of her hands and body, all the signs labelling her as a soul lost to the world. They try to treat it the best they can, grinding herbs, even using electroshock therapy to no avail.

Bellamy is the one to suggest just talking to her.

She doesn’t respond to her mother or Jackson, but when Octavia comes in, surly and unwilling, she grabs her with all the strength she has and whispers, “I’m doing the best I can?”  
Octavia shrugs her arm out of her grip, but says softly under her breath, “I think you thought you were.”

Clarke nods like this makes sense, and then slumps back in her bed, the first signs of relief returning to her face.

Raven is next, followed by Monty and Miller, then Harper, Monroe, Lincoln. They all sit with her, coax her out of her head, hold her down when she starts having an attack. Raven speaks about her childhood with Finn, and Clarke cries with her, their hands intertwined on the bedsheets.

Monty is hard, with their shared guilt, the burden they don’t realise they share. Miller and Harper tell their stories, jumping back and forth between moments of heroism and moments of horror. Monroe remembers the planning, reminding Clarke of Lexa and everything they did together.

Lincoln just sits, sometimes with Octavia, sometimes not. He knows this routine, knows the weight death has on the soul, what being a monster can do to who you are. Sometimes they draw together, the lead scratching on the paper in the silence of the small room on the fallen Ark.

It takes him a long time to come.

 

-

 

For days he is relentlessly bullied by Raven, Octavia, even Lincoln with a few measured words. But they don’t understand it. They never had to pull a lever, to make that call, and then get abandoned by the one they made it with. They were never left so brutally, still holding onto all the pain and heartache.

He hasn’t seen her since that glimpse when she was carried back in, a skeletal figure in Lincoln’s arms. For one horrible minute he thought she was dead, and the world nearly stopped spinning for a moment. Then she made a horrible gasping sound, and he walked away.

The insanity didn’t surprise him. The fact that it hadn’t happened to him did surprise him, however. Whatever she said, it was his fault too. He obsessively scrubbed at his hands every night, trying to get the blood he could still feel on his skin. He had thrown himself into the everyday minutiae of life, under Kane’s orders, no longer willing to fight for control. He had to deal with it too.

Finally, he caves, and asks them where she is.

She’s asleep when arrives. Her face is fuller than the last time, but she’s still skin and bone. Her fingernails are cracked and broken, and crescent moon scars mar the palms of her hands. Her hair is still the same though, fanned out across the burlap pillow, and he tries to focus on that, tries to remember the arrogant princess who used to prod him in the chest and tell him what to do.

She stirs, and he backs away.

“Bellamy?” she asks, like she’s not sure he’s real.

“Hey,” he says, cringing at the insufficient word.

“Are you alright?”

He wants to laugh. She’s half-dead and out of her mind, but she still wants to make sure her people are okay. Only Clarke.

“I’ve been better,” he replies, sitting down.

“Me too,” she says, closing her eyes again.

It’s not much, but it’s this, this shared knowledge, this effortless understanding, that broke the dam between them, and now everything comes flooding out.

He visits her everyday now, sometimes twice if he’s not on patrol duty. She’s getting better, everyone can see that, but she’s best with him, and that makes him slightly proud. He still gets terrified when she has her fits and has to be restrained, and even sports three small scars on his left cheek from when she had flown at him with no recognition in her eyes, screaming out names like curses.

But most of the time she’s quiet, placid even, happy to play cards or go over rationing sheets with him. Other times she’s distant, and that haunted look comes back into her eyes, so he has to bring her back again. They start going for walks, only around the perimeter of the camp so Abby doesn’t lose her mind with worry again.

What they do is talk mostly. They talk and they talk, and it’s silly to think of words as healing, but that’s what they do, soothing an ache briefly as they share their nightmares, the things they play over and over in their heads, the what-ifs that torture them on a daily basis.

When Clarke sees Jasper again for the first time, while she and Bellamy are walking as normal, she seems to shrink beside him.

He stops in front of them, gangly frame tense, and says curtly, “I won’t ever forgive you, but I do understand.” He walks away then, and Clarke begins to cry, so softly that Bellamy only notices when he hears her hiccup.

“Hey,” he says, just like the first time they met again, and pulls her to him. They hug, her face pressed into his shoulder, his hand tangled in her hair. Just like last time, but much less bittersweet. She still smells like blood and dirt, but he doubts he’s much better.

They stand like that for a long time, then Clarke pulls away, and smiles, so brief he almost misses it, but it’s there, hovering at the corner of her mouth alongside her grief. There too lies his hope.

Things are different between them now, so imperceptible that he thinks he’s the only one that notices. She’s much more affectionate now, leaning her shoulder into his when they sit side by side, ruffling his hair to annoy him, even laying her hand on top of his own when he least expects it.

Her mother has also deemed her safe to move out of the makeshift hospital wing, and she lives with Raven now, in an old boiler room they converted to be part workshop, part living space. She even gets light duties, helping the people from Agro Station to make salves and bandages for the medical bay.

He sometimes catches her eye when he’s on rounds, and she smiles at him. Just him, and only for him. He keeps those smiles in a quiet place inside himself, one the night terrors haven’t reached yet.

Then Murphy comes back.

The camp is a frenzy of action, trying to coordinate and plan a way out, a way through this new threat. Bellamy is thrown into meetings, liaising with Kane on strategy, on how to approach a threat so much more epic than themselves, when he hears a knock at their door.

 

-

 

She isn’t sure what she’s doing when she begins the walk to the Council chambers. She only knows that Murphy is here, panicked in a way which has frightened everyone around her. He talks about a woman, the end of days, and a man gone mad with lost power and grief.

Clarke knows a little bit about that.

She knocks at the door, and when it swings open, she’s met with Bellamy’s concerned face.

“Clarke?” he says, worry creasing his brow. “Are you alright?”

And, inexplicably, she is. Seeing Bellamy’s face, like always, cleared the fog in her thoughts. He was clarity personified, and sometimes when the dark memories would resurface, he was her only respite. Because he had those thoughts too, you see.

“I need to talk to you for a minute,” she says, reaching for his hand and tugging him along the corridor.

“I’m in the middle of a meeting, Clarke” he protests, confusion clouding his face as she carries on and pulls him into a side corridor off the main passageway. She checks to make sure the coast is clear, and the turns back to him.

“I’m sorry for dragging you away, but we need to go over a few things,” she says decisively.

“Look, this isn’t really the best time...” He’s cut off by Clarke reaching up and planting a kiss square on his lips. He freezes underneath her for a second, terrifying her, then responds in kind, kissing her back in a way that makes her feel things she hasn’t felt since Lexa. But this feels better, more like coming home at the end of a long day than jumping out of a dropship.

If anyone was going to be inevitable, it was going to be them.

After a solid few minutes of making out, Bellamy pulls back and clears his throat, expression slightly dazed.

“Uh,” he says, his arms winding around her waist more securely. “Was there anything else?”

Clarke looks up at him and beams, not timid and wary like her other ones, this one filled with confidence. 

“I’ll tell you when we get back to the meeting,”

She wraps his hand around her own, and together they walk back into the room, which is now preparing for war once more. Kane and her mother are the first to notice her, more present here then she has been for a long time.

It will take a long time to get better, Clarke knows that. It might never happen, and she may spend the rest of her days fighting this disorder, this chaos which keeps playing havoc with her mind and sending her raging at all her loved ones. 

But then she looks at Bellamy, sees the strength in him despite his sorrows, and looks for her friends, all of them living with their actions every day, and she has a thought. She may be Prisoner 319, prosecuted in the court of sky and ground, but it would be more criminal of her not to at least try.

“So,” she says, stepping forward and holding her head up high, co-leader at her side and ghosts all around her.

“Where do we start?”

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed, and that it wasn't too angsty. It's a different style than I normally write in but it was really fun to do! Let me know what you think, and come find me on [tumblr!](http://princess-blakes.tumblr.com)


End file.
